Photo: Warner Bros. Animation/Hanna-Barbera
Years ago I made a guest appearance on CBS News to talk about the revelation in the new animated movie Trick or Treat Scooby-Doo! that Velma, a main character in the long-running Scooby-Doo series, likes girls. After just one look at a comely female costume designer named Coco Diablo, Velma goes all googly-eyed.
“Jinkies!”
For anyone even vaguely familiar with who’s who in the Scooby-Doo franchise, which debuted in 1969 via the animated TV series Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, this shouldn’t be an earth-shattering development. As cartoon characters go, Velma has always appeared to be fairly asexual, and if I had thought to consider her sexual orientation before (and I admit, I honestly hadn’t), she easily could have gone either way.
James Gunn, who wrote two Scooby-Doo movies in the early 2000s (2002’s Scooby-Doo and 2004’s Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed), wanted to make her “explicitly” gay, but studio interference prevented him from going there. In 2020, Tony Cervone, producer of Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated, sort of outed Velma in an Instagram post where he admitted to having dropped hints that she might be gay, bi, or sexually fluid in his 2010–2013 animated series. Trick or Treat goes further than hinting.
As I pointed out during my CBS News interview, though, the world has changed a lot in 20 — or even 10 — years. Same-sex marriage is now legal in the U.S. and many other countries, and a once-groundbreaking show like Will & Grace, which helped introduce gay TV characters to a larger audience, now seems pretty quaint. LGBTQ characters are the norm on TV these days for shows set in modern times, and — surprise! — the world is still turning.
Of course, some people haven’t quite caught up. As I perused the YouTube comments on the CBS News channel under the clip of my appearance, I was surprised to see how many people are upset by the sexual-orientation reveal of a character they probably hadn’t thought about in years. Imagine what an uproar Trick or Treat would have caused if Fred or Daphne had been the one ogling someone of the same gender!
But the honor goes to Velma. The bespectacled brainiac in the group of teen sleuths, she’s even more sexless than Shaggy. I can’t think of a safer character to make queer than Velma. If it had been Fred or Daphne, homophobes would have had to think about them having “gay sex” — because as far as homophobes are concerned, that’s all gay people are about.
Velma saves them from having to consider such sordid stuff. Even if you know she’s attracted to girls, your mind likely won’t wander to first base. Shaggy would have been a bigger problem: The general population have always been able to handle gay women more easily than gay men, unless the gay man is a campy sidekick with no discernible sex life.
Oh, but revealing that Velma likes a girl is apparently sacrilege — the destruction of a childhood fantasy world where sexual orientation supposedly doesn’t exist. “WHY do I need to know this about a carton,” one YouTube commenter wrote. Know what? That Velma has lust in her heart…for a girl? If you’ve ever watched Scooby-Doo, you know that Daphne and Fred are into each other (they are, after all, a couple), and that’s never bothered anyone.
Author and Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo vented on-air about “disrupting” our “beloved characters” and wondered if cartoon bestiality — perhaps between Scooby and Shaggy — is next. Clearly he hasn’t watched enough cartoons in his life.
Scooby-Doo got to have a girlfriend, and no-one complained about the sexualization of a canine. Micky Mouse has Minnie. Donald Duck has Daisy. In Peanuts, Charlie Brown crushes on the Little Red-Haired Girl; Lucy wants Schroeder; and Sally has a thing for Linus. They’re obviously as straight as dogs, mice, ducks, and grade-schoolers can be. So are the romantic leads of countless fairytales. The Prince in Walt Disney’s Cinderella goes trolling through an entire kingdom carrying a glass slipper because he presumably can’t remember what the woman who turned his head on sight last night looks like. Any lady will do — as long as the shoe fits!
We know “this” about so many cartoon characters, so why is Velma’s attraction to a beautiful cartoon girl with bouncy, shampoo commercial-ready hair suddenly too much information? I haven’t watched Trick or Treat, but I’m pretty certain we’ll be spared any cartoon sex scenes.
Still, no matter how chaste Velma’s same-sex attraction is, I hope this will lead to the outing of more cartoon characters. Who knows? If Pinocchio’s dapper fox Honest John had been allowed to be his true self, he might not have been such a scheming snake. Maybe our favorite talking puppet would have become a real boy before recess.
This post originally appeared on Medium and is edited and republished with author's permission. Read more of Jeremy Heligar's work on Medium.